With the passing of the smoking ban, Virginia demonstrates that, when it comes to individual liberty, its ongoing urbanization renders it just another Mid-Atlantic nanny state like New Jersey, Maryland, and New York. I don't need to rehash the libertarian arguments against smoking bans in private establishments. I will, however, note the following:
- Despite an email sent out by a minority of Republicans in the legislature, this ban passed with bipartisan support.
- Republicans are the worst advocates of libertarian policy imaginable. They're all too eager to go along to get along. And if they do have some moderate libertarian positions, they usually shoot their consistency in the foot by being moral policemen to the max (see my thoughts on the Blackburn vs. Stoch race).
- We erroneously and self-righteously frame this issue in simplistic terms of "rights" and "freedom" and "liberty", a language that nanny staters learned long ago to turn around on us. Nobody is against "freedom" or "liberty" or "rights", so this approach does not capture the essence of the controversy. If this were about abstractions like "rights", there are far more egregious government intrusions that would have been rejected long ago. No, we are against bans on peaceful behavior because they are enforced by men trained to hurt and kill us - period.
It's time to stop pretending our self-important, philosophical civics lessons wrapped in political activism work. Our outrage at the state, heartfelt as it may be, is not nearly enough to constitute the necessary resistance, nor is the rhetoric it produces adequate to the task of appealing to our fellow man. We have to start showing people that this is not a game: passing superfluous and intrusive laws pits men trained in violence and suppression against peaceful people. Confront the nanny staters directly with the means they've chosen to promote their agendas and ask them why they want to threaten, hurt, and even kill us and our fellow human beings. The stakes are too high to treat this as a friendly debate about ideas.
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My first real YouTube upload with my new iFlip camcorder:
Attachment_fu is the shit, no doubt. But sometimes you want to do more than upload, resize, and thumbnail. Designers often have a specific vision that dictates a more complex workflow for incoming images. For these tasks, it may be necessary to reprocess the saved images - something you don't necessarily need to hack attachment_fu to accomplish.
For example, my latest Rails project included a gallery page with a pretty standard layout: a series of thumbnails and an area to display the full size version of the selected thumbnail. However, the static mockup delivered by the designer had thumbnails that were black and white with a blueish tint, only turning color when you moused over them. On top of that, the thumbnails were often made from a manually defined cropping of the image. This meant that in addition to an administrative backend to allow uploading and management, I needed to provide a tool for selecting an area within the image for a custom thumbnail, not to mention figuring out where and how to do the tinting.
So here's how I approached it: I created two STI models deriving from a common GalleryImage model, all of which are related to the GalleryItem that encapsulates the item name, description, etc:
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In case you don't get the Facebook invite, feel free to join Tasha and me for duckpin bowling at Plaza Bowl (523 E Southside Plz) on Wednesday at 6:30pm to celebrate my 30th birthday!
According to DoD sources, the Obama Administration wants to have soldiers and officers pledge a loyalty oath directly to the office of the President, and no longer to the Constitution. This has been discredited, see snopes.
Charles Johnson explores the epistemic problem of determining voluntary consent to the state, both its existence and its possibiltity.
You know what's stupid? Clumsily checking for a javascript redirect in your RJS with this kind of shit:
it "should redirect to the collaborative quote screen" do
xhr :post, 'attach', :attachment_id => '4023'
response.body.should =~ /window\.location\.href = \"/collabquote\";"
end
Not only is this ugly, but it ties your test to a particular route, rather than allowing you to use your named route. So I whipped up a custom RJS redirect matcher in about 10 minutes following the guidelines in this post, and I was surprised how easy it was. It should be pretty self explanatory.
module RedirectViaRjsToMatcher
class RedirectViaRjsTo
def initialize(expected)
@expected = expected
end
def matches?(target)
@target = target
@url = target.body.split('"')[1]
@target.body == "window.location.href = \"#{@expected}\";"
end
def failure_message
"expected redirect via rjs to #{@expected}, redirected instead to #{@url}"
end
def negative_failure_message
"unexpected redirect via rjs to #{@expected}"
end
end
# Actual matcher that is exposed
def redirect_via_rjs_to(expected)
RedirectViaRjsTo.new(expected)
end
end
All you need to do is save this file in /spec/custom/redirect_via_rjs_to.rb and include it in /spec/spec_helper.rb like so:
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"The centrists control our politics, our media and our campuses. They have directed the collapse of both the American empire and America democracy and yet are so self absorbed in their manic and destructive moderation that they don't even notice."
The Guardian profiles twenty-five people who brought about the financial collapse of 2008.
So Matt O., I, and our wives rolled over to Plaza Bowl and Duckpins this past Thursday to duckpin bowl and drink PBR pitchers. We had a great time and ended up talking to the owner (it was a slow night). He asked us about any ideas we had for better marketing the place and we had a great conversation that really explored our love for the place.
Plaza Bowl is really just an incredibly fun destination - it's laid back, and you don't feel pressure to bowl 300. There's now a stage where some of the lanes used to be, and bands play regularly. It's got a great retro feel since none of the equipment has been manufactured for decades, and the owner maintains it himself.
In fact, we were thrilled that he invited us behind the scenes to observe the 1950s era machinery that runs the lanes, and I snapped some pictures on my iPhone. As programmers Matt and I were amazed at this complex mechanical state machine, and there's an aesthetic to the vintage gears, chains, and conveyor belts that adds to the appeal. A steampunk's dream!
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It's only a matter of time before world governments step in to subsidize this lynchpin of globalized capitalism.
Check me out elsewhere:
- I wrote an article reporting on the recent Virginia People's Assembly.
- Also, the Alliance reported on the military operations in the metro Richmond area.
- Check out my sign for the VPA rally tomorrow. Destined to be a left libertarian classic. Just look at how I'm completely and totally in no way screwed up the ALL logo!
In other news, I'm loving my new, all-Ruby job.
Remember the march from Kanawha Plaza at 4:30 PM on Wednesday!
[caption id="attachment_1280" align="alignleft" width="358" caption="RadicalRichmond.net"]
[/caption]One of the great things about Richmond is that we have a pretty decent activist community already here. The Alliance has benefited from working with these groups, since building alternative institutions that can displace the state doesn't mean ignoring those that already exist! I've learned so much just by participating in other organizations, getting to know the people who care enough to act, and hitting the streets with them.
However, one of the problems I've noticed is that there's not enough communication between activists about their activities. While different groups and people may have different priorities or divergent agendas, there are too many issues where we agree - but because we're not a member of one or another group, we never find out about opportunities to join forces with like minded activists. What is needed is a central clearing house that everybody can come to in order to see what's going on in Richmond.
I've been talking about this idea for a year or two now, and I've finally found a core group of motivated people who can help me run such a site. They represent a variety of activist interests throughout the metro area, but we all agree that the community as a whole benefits when one hand knows what the other is doing. RadicalRichmond.net will attempt to serve as a community site and dissemination point for activism info in the central Virginia area. Please spread the word and contribute!
Just in case you hadn't heard, this app rocks.
